Anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's murder stirs what-ifs amid violence

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Rabin was one of the most inarticulate prime ministers in Israel’s history. He had particular difficulty in putting down his thoughts on paper. Most of his speeches and articles were written for him by his aides. Consequently, there is not a single text with a clear exposition of his political creed. This does not mean, however, that he did not leave behind distinctive political legacy. He did and his legacy is ever more relevant in the context of the diplomatic standstill and rapidly escalating violence in Israel-Palestine today.

Rabin’s political legacy, in a nutshell, is that there is no purely military solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This was not always his view, but something he learned from experience. Rabin was a soldier who turned to peacemaking relatively late in his political career. When the first Palestinian intifada broke out in 1987, Rabin was defence minister in a national unity government led by the Likud. His initial order to the IDF was to “break the bones” of the demonstrators. Only gradually did it dawn on him that this was in essence a political conflict that could only be resolved by political means.

After Labor won the election of 1992, Rabin acted on this premise and the result was the Oslo accord of 13 September 1993 and the hesitant handshake with Yasser Arafat on the lawn of the White House. This was the first ever agreement between the two main parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict: Israel and the Palestinians. The critics of the Oslo accord argue that it was doomed to failure from the start. My own view is that it was a modest step in the right direction, the beginning of the search for a political settlement to the bitter and prolonged conflict between the two rival national movements.

Yitzhak Rabin negotiated from strength and he went forward towards the Palestinians on the political plane

The assassin’s bullet put an end to this process. What might have happened had Rabin not been killed, there is no way of knowing. History does not disclose its alternatives. What is fairly clear is that the Oslo peace process broke down because, following the return of the Likud to power under the leadership of Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996, Israel reneged on its side of the deal.

Paradoxically, Rabin may yet go down in Israel’s history as the only true disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of the Israeli right. Jabotinsky was the architect, in the early 1920s, of the strategy of “the iron wall”. The essence of this strategy was to deal with the Arab enemies from a position of unassailable military strength. The premise behind it was that an independent Jewish state in Palestine could only be achieved unilaterally and by military force.

There were two stages to this strategy. First, the Jewish state had to be built behind an “iron wall” of Jewish military power. The Arabs, predicted Jabotinsky, would repeatedly hit their heads against the wall until they despaired of defeating the Zionists on the battlefield. Then, and only then, would come the time for stage two: to negotiate with the Palestine Arabs about their status and rights in Palestine.

Prospect of a new intifada in Palestinian Territories | Letters

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The politicians of the right have always been fixated on stage one of the “iron wall” strategy, on accumulating more and more military power in order to preserve the status quo, and keep the Palestinians in a permanent state of subservience. Netanyahu is a prime example of this approach. He is a reactionary status quo politician who has no interest in negotiations and compromise with the Palestinians and who now explicitly rejects a two-state solution. For him and his ilk, only Jews have historic rights over the whole “Land of Israel”. This makes him the proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict.

Yitzhak Rabin was the first Israeli leader to move from stage one to stage two of the strategy of “the iron wall” in relation to the Palestinians. He practised what Jabotinsky had preached: he negotiated from strength and he went forward towards the Palestinians on the political plane. For him, at least in the twilight of his political career, military power was not an end in itself but a means to an end: a negotiated settlement of the century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Rabin appreciated the value of military power but, unlike the politicians of the right, he also understood its limits. That is his true and enduring political legacy. It is as relevant today, when a third Palestinian intifada seems in the making, as it was 20 years ago.